Bancocracy

Bancocracy

Once upon a time there were parliaments, federal and national governments, and public debates about the future of the nations. There was even the UN that didn’t work very well, but it was still a bit of a representative body. All this is memory, ashes of democratic shadow, dust from the past. It no longer counts for anything. Other organisms have superseded them with acronyms that people find mysterious: WTO, ECB, IMF. Our destiny is in their hands, but we don’t know who directs them, or who decides their objectives. No one has elected the representatives there, but our lives depend on them. The ECB, a bank, can send a letter to a government in power giving the details of the conditions and threatening to sack them and no one is scandalised by that. The WTO can decide to break up the world with the free economy, a parody of free love of the children of the flowers transformed into children of the banks. Production can be entrusted by the multinationals to Indian children or Chinese workers with no Trade Union rights. Transferred from States with really severe regulations regarding the environment, to which companies have to conform or face closure, to States where everything is allowed. What global competition are we talking about? Competition exists where there’s parity of regulations and of rights. It’s more correct to talk about global exploitation, of the general lowering of wages in the industrialised nations, of the loss of social and Trade Union gains that are the fruit of the battles of the preceding generations. Who has decided all this? The WTO. In whose name? The International Monetary Fund puts one in mind of the vultures. Its representatives arrive when a State is in its death throes to protect international interests. Greece cannot go into default straight away. If it were to fail, the French banks that have its debts, could fail. Thus first, it has to sell off its national patrimony and save the banks. The world is bank-centric and there’s no longer even any discussion of social policy. The EU has been substituted by the ECB, the UN by the WTO, the governments by the IMF. The wars themselves have only economic ends, no longer ideological, religious or territorial ones as has been demonstrated by the war in Libya. The banks finance the wars that in turn finance the banks. In the hotel they ask you for your credit card instead of your ID card. At birth they allocate you a fiscal code, together with your personal quota of public debt, before assigning you a paediatrician. The politicians are the waiters of the bankers and we pay the bill.